Oh yeah, don't want to forget about this:

Time Magazine Prints Different Cover For US Edition
TIME's cover story in every edition but the American one is "Talibanistan", a story about the resurgence of the Taliban. TIME's cover for the US: "Why We Should Teach the Bible in Public School".

/just throwing gasoline on the fire, don't mind me

Elchip
"Is there a report on whether... say, Hindu people with near-death experiences see Ganesh, or Islamic people see Muhammad, etc?"

They never really said they saw god, they felt a presense and were at ease with it. They basically interpreted it as beeing God. So I would assume that the Hindus and such would interpret it to be thier God.

I saw where you were going with this.

OOOoooOOOOooo I'm sooooo scared.

You dreamed it up, you burn in it.

theknuckler_33

I think you do not understand my meaning.

The Pope was also later heard saying "Hey I was almost a Nazi, does anyone remember that?"

Crux'd Why can't people be open minded about Religion.

i think the ones with the biggest chip have had dealing with over zealous, holier than thow, "christians". it gives them a bad taste for all religious folk, even those that they wouldn't even know were religious unless they asked.

elchip: Is there a report on whether... say, Hindu people with near-death experiences see Ganesh, or Islamic people see Muhammad, etc?

Pretty much. It's not an all or nothing thing. You can play games with peoples heads by stimulating the fun parts of their frontal lobes. Religious experience, dead relatives talking - all that jazz. Yes, some people do have the negative ass experience. Almost everyone (from the studies I have read) have said their lives changed after that. It's not nice to do this to a person on purpose, but some Doctors do, then write papers on it.

You also get people who suffer from extreme oxygen deprivation that have these sort of hallucinations. When people schiz out, or have brain abnormalities, they *may* have the same sort of experiences. The near death thing gets a lot of write ups because it's weird, and popular.

However, the 'being able to tell what's going on in the room, outside the hall, down the street, what's in your pocket' type thing doesn't have a good explanation. The thing where people die for a bit then go wandering around looking at shiat is pretty odd. Like, they can tell you that some idiot forget to take his Nikes converses off the roof of the hospital parking garage, and there is no way the person could know that.

I dunno. It's like some people, when they're bodies are convinced they are dying, are able to tap into this great universal consciousness, where they can sort of skip to different areas that interest them. I do think it's people oriented. But it makes you wonder if we 'are' all part of a hive intelligence some people are able to share? And if that is the case - what happens when the organism dies?

Dunno. Weird stuff.

Crux'd

I can talk about anything I want, even religion.

Where the line is crossed is legislating your religion above others; I wouldn't lower myself to that evangelical level.

2007-03-27 04:42:07 PM miscreant


cyberlayde
Now that's something I wouldn't want to take a chance on.

Well Pascal, by that logic you need to believe in ANY religion/cult that says you will suffer if you don't believe... but of course you can't because a good many of them also say you can't believe the other ones.

Any just god, if he exists, will judge people on their actions and how they live their life, not on whether or not they gave up their rationality to believe in some silly story. A god that will punish people eternally for not ignoring common sense and rationality is nothing but a monster and would not deserve to be worshiped anyway.


Maybe God doesn't care. Maybe God isn't so nice.

luke10_27: That's not even remotely close to what I said, is it? I said she knew things she couldn't possibly have known. Things that hadn't taken place yet. Stuff that happened while she was dead. Nice attempt at a strawman, though. Better luck next time.

Here is the article, and the quotes from it that refer to the "dead" girl:

http://discovermagazine.com/2005/jul/extreme-states/article_view?b_start:int=0 &-C=




In 1982, physician Melvin Morse had a case that piqued his curiosity about these extreme states of consciousness. Morse was moonlighting for a helicopter-assisted EMT service while finishing up his residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital in Seattle. One afternoon he was flown to Pocatello, Idaho, to perform CPR on 8-year-old Crystal Merzlock, who had apparently drowned in the deep end of a community swimming pool. When Morse arrived on the scene, the child had been without a heartbeat for 19 minutes; her pupils were already fixed and dilated. Morse got her heart restarted, climbed into the chopper, and went home. Three days later Crystal regained consciousness.

A few weeks passed. Morse was back at the hospital where Crystal was being treated, and they bumped into each other in the hallway. Crystal pointed at Morse, turned to her mother, and said, "That's the guy who put the tube in my nose at the swimming pool." Morse was stunned. "I didn't know what to do. I had never heard of OBEs [out-of-body experiences] or NDEs[near-death experiences]. I stood there thinking: How was this possible? When I put that tube in her nose, she was brain dead. How could she even have this memory?"

None of this work is without controversy, but an increasing number of scientists now think that our brains are wired for mystical experiences. The studies confirm that these experiences are as real as any others, because our involvement with the rest of the universe is mediated by our brains. Whether these experiences are simply right temporal lobe activity, as many suspect, or, as Britton's work hints and Morse believes, a whole brain effect, remains an open question. But Persinger thinks there is a simple explanation for why people with near-death experience have memories of things that occurred while they were apparently dead. The memory-forming structures lie deep within the brain, he says, and they probably remain active for a few minutes after brain activity in the outer cortex has stopped. Still, Crystal Merzlock remembered events that occurred more than 19 minutes after her heart stopped. Nobody has a full explanation for this phenomenon, and we are left in that very familiar mystical state: the one where we still don't have all the answers.


There you go, a small gap for your "god".

Everytime I read one of these rants its never about Judism or Buhdism or Muslims just Jesus based. Just curious to know why?

I'm not a religious person at all. But I don't hate anyone's faith (or lack thereof), so this is just an observation based on my own personal experience. Over my lifetime I've had lots of people try to convert me to their religion. I've been given pamphlets, tracts, asked if I've "been saved", prayed over, and in one sad situation, lost a good friend who decided she could only be friends with people who belonged to her church, which I repeatedly refused to join. Once I was watching an old rerun of "Bewitched" on a display TV at an electronics store while waiting for a friend to check out. I was accosted by a woman who told me that the show was "Satanic" and my soul was in danger for having watched it. She then invited me to her church and began to pray for me when I politely refused.

How many times has somebody attempted to convert me or force me in some way to accept religion in the last 20-30 years? At least 50-60 times. I'm not joking. How many of these people were Muslim, Jews, Buddhists, Wiccans, or anything other than Christians? Simple answer: None.

As I said, I'm not bashing, but I've honestly never had one single person of any faith other than Christianity try to shove religion on me.

From article: In October, the Pope indicated that limbo, supposed since medieval times to be a "halfway house" between heaven and hell, was "only a theological hypothesis" and not a "definitive truth of the faith".

I always thought Purgatory was the "halfway house" not Limbo. And if Limbo no longer exists, I want back the money I donated to save all those Pagan Babies. Pagan Babies were a big deal back in the day. I donated a lot of candy money on their behalf.

/feels cheated
//recovering Catholic, obviously

fudgefactor7: That's what I'm a-wonderin'.... Didn't JPII say that Hell was just the lack of God and not a real place? (Or something to that effect.)

I'll have to ask my husband. He's Catholic and stays up on this stuff. I'm just a heretic. We did away with hell a while ago.

Good thing Benedict wasn't speaking "ex cathedra", so this all can be chucked out as blathering generalisms.

I thought everytime he made a statement like this he pretty much was speaking as...whatever the Pope really is? I'm Episcopalian. We argue a lot. We do think the Pope is a gas, though :)

Gig103's above quotes bring a concept.... Maybe JPII and Benedict are talking to two different beings, both portraying themselves as "God." Or perhaps God is bipolar, or MPD, or something.

/still fubarized, if you ask me

luke10_27: Where's your "empirical" evidence for this? You don't have any. Read the Discover article I cited above and read that you are wrong.

Quit pulling "facts" out of your arse.

Anyone who can be unconscious for that long and recover without serious aftereffects was clearly not braindead. If they really went without air to the brain for longer than a few minutes, none of them would've been able to talk about it. Something stinks here, most likely it being their diagnosis.

JOEKC I want back the money I donated to save all those Pagan Babies.

i'm actually curious as to how money was going to save the souls of pagan babies?

anarchist
As I said, I'm not bashing, but I've honestly never had one single person of any faith other than Christianity try to shove religion on me.

maybe you should move to a place with a more homogenous culture.

2007-03-27 04:50:39 PM Weaver95 [TotalFark]


I think this time i'll wait for the bigotry to get up past the 400 posts limit before I start reporting people for violations of the Farq.


What are we talking about again? Where are the personal aspersions?

Weaver95

Smartass.

Everytime I read one of these rants its never about Judism or Buhdism or Muslims just Jesus based. Just curious to know why?

Never seen a Muslim rant here? You new?

luke10_27: Where's your "empirical" evidence for this? You don't have any. Read the Discover article I cited above and read that you are wrong.

Quit pulling "facts" out of your arse.

"Brain death" cannot be recovered from essentially by definition, because it is when the part of your body that allows you to think and reason dies. It is the state when the brain ceases to function and has no electrical activity. Once you're brain dead, your body can be kept operating by machines but you will never wake up again.

What you are talking about is "near-death" experiences. These are events where the body's systems shut down, the heart stops beating, and the brain is starved of oxygen. It starts to shut down then, but you get a good 5-8 minutes before you're irrevokably gone. If someone performs CPR or otherwise stabilizes your condition so that your blood begins circulating once more, you can recover. You also weren't brain dead. No one has ever "woken up" from brain death, short of on Star Trek where they used "cortical stimulators" specifically to answer the question of brain death being such a medical issue today.

Brain death is the medical definition of death. If your heart stops and you see the tunnel of light, you are having a "near-death" moment. That's time for CPR. If you're brain dead, the best thing to do is look through your pockets for some spare change.

Definitions like this are important in medical matters.

Crux'd

Why can't people be open minded about Religion. Let people believe in what they want to. The only ones who should be offended by a cross is a vampire. If you dont want to believe in God then stop talking about people who do,...

the Pope opened up the path to criticism here by saying he that hell is real, but like every other fanatic has failed to produce how he knows this.

People should be angry because that kind of nonsense has cost people their lives throughout the ages, and continues to do so. People can believe what they want, but when they use what they believe to control others, that is not belief anymore, it's bullying.

Weaver95: I think this time i'll wait for the bigotry to get up past the 400 posts limit before I start reporting people for violations of the Farq.

Wow. Sandy vag alert.

Why I don't beleive in the Devil...

Personally I don't understand how the idea even became popular in the first place. Who knows, I guess it could have started with Azazyel, the original scapegoat blamed for the fall of man from grace. Oh, don't bother looking for Azazyel in your Bible he won't be there. He was mentioned along with a legion of angels in the Book of Enoch.

Well, I guess we can start by taking a look at Genesis after all that is where most people believe the Devil is introduced. Alright, so let's open up your bible and start where the devil is introduced.....can't find it? That's because it's not there but what about Satan...nope not there either. So what, a talking snake made Eve eat the apple? Well if you believe that the World was created in 6 days then it wouldn't be that big of a leap. But inferring that the snake was actually the adversary of God (1) doesn't seem right.

Book of Job is another place that people look to but again it seems sort of weird to do so. When reading that book does it really seem like two enemies talking? In the book of Job we read how Job, a righteous man, lost the things which he had in this life. The book teaches that the experience of 'evil' in a person's life is not directly proportional to their obedience or disobedience to God. Job recognized that "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away" (Job 1:21). He does not say 'The Lord gave and Satan took away'. He commented to his wife: "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not (also) receive evil?" (Job 2:10). At the end of the book, Job's friends comforted him over "all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him" (Job 42:11 cp. 19:21; 8:4). Thus God is the source of "evil" in the sense of being the ultimate permitted of the problems that we have in our lives.

But wait a minute can we really blame God for the evil in the world? Why not it seem pretty clear to me that all light is derived from one source..."I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." (Isah 45: 5-7 KJ)

Well I am getting tired of typing... but let me leave you with this.

"Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men." (Mathew 16:23) go take a look at who said this and who he said it to.

(1)As a word, 'satan' is an untranslated Hebrew word which means 'adversary', while 'devil' is a translation of the Greek word 'diabolos', meaning a liar, an enemy or false accuser.

anarchist
Less homogenous, I meant LESS homogenous.

Weaver95: I think this time i'll wait for the bigotry to get up past the 400 posts limit before I start reporting people for violations of the Farq.

LMAO!!!

Hey LavenderWolf

I am not a hardcore religious person at all, I feel uncomfortable calling myself a Catholic simply because I don't think I fit the criteria, however I really respect the basic tenants of the Church. So no I am not a Catholic, at least not now. I would never generalize a whole grp of people into one harsh catagory, thats like callign all Germans Nazis.

In regards to Laegislature, what do you mean? what legislature ?

Why is it that Christian/Catholic/Pope threads bring out the hate more than any other?

luke10_27: Stuff that happened while she was dead.

Her Mom was farking and conceiving while the daughter was dying?

What a biatch!

Anyhooo, from YOUR farking article:

When Morse arrived on the scene, the child had been without a heartbeat for 19 minutes; her pupils were already fixed and dilated. Morse got her heart restarted, climbed into the chopper, and went home. Three days later Crystal regained consciousness.

A few weeks passed. Morse was back at the hospital where Crystal was being treated, and they bumped into each other in the hallway. Crystal pointed at Morse, turned to her mother, and said, "That's the guy who put the tube in my nose at the swimming pool." Morse was stunned. "I didn't know what to do. I had never heard of OBEs [out-of-body experiences] or NDEs[near-death experiences]. I stood there thinking: How was this possible? When I put that tube in her nose, she was brain dead. How could she even have this memory?"

Now, from MY farking article:

Clinically, a person is brain dead when all of the following conditions are met:

1. There are no spontaneous respirations (the person cannot take a single breath on his/her own).

2. The pupils are dilated and fixed (the black of the eyes is wide and does not react to light).

3. There is no response to noxious stimulation (painful stimulation provokes no eyeblink, no grimacing, no movements of any part of the body).

4. All extremities are flaccid (there is no movement, no muscle tone and no reflex activity in any of the limbs - arms or legs).

5. There are no signs of brain stem activity:

1. The eyeballs are fixed in the orbits.

2. There are no corneal reflexes (stroking the clear part of the eye with a fine wisp of cotton fails to produce any movement of the eyelids).

3. There is no response to caloric testing (exposing the tympanic membrane of the ear to ice cold water fails to produce movement of the eyes).

4. There is no gag reflex or cough reflex.

If all of the clinical criteria of "brain death" have been met, a person cannot be declared "brain dead" until the physician has made sure that no opiate drugs (ex. codeine, demerol, morphine, cocaine, heroin) and no barbiturate drugs (ex. phenobarbital, secobarbital, nembutal, amytal) have been administered in the previous 24 hours and that brain death has been confirmed by one of the following diagnostic studies:

1. Cerebral angiogram (injection of a dye into the arteries of the neck to show the arteries of the brain on x-ray films), showing no penetration of dye into the arteries of the brain.

2. Cerebral blood flow scan (scan of the head after intravenous injection of a safe radioactive substance) showing no blood flow in the brain.

3. Two EEG's (electroencephalograms or brain-wave tests) at about 24-hour intervals showing no electrical activity coming from the brain, i.e., flat or isoelectric tracings.


Since not all of these things had been done, she could not have been diagnosed as "brain dead". Dr. Morse unfortunately mis-used the term.

And please no "he's the doctor" argument. The child did not have a brain scan, she was not clinically brain dead. As her eventual recovery showed.

And as to her magical knowledge of her doctor (not her mother, ya goof) do you really think it's possible for "a few weeks" to have passed with not a single person speaking to her about the remarkable nature of her recovery, and the doctor who helped make it possible?

You know, something non-magical?

And finally, the article is nowhere near as supportive of your point as you seem to think it is. A number of processes and chemicals are described which induce similar effects.

The article's last paragraph states:

None of this work is without controversy, but an increasing number of scientists now think that our brains are wired for mystical experiences. The studies confirm that these experiences are as real as any others, because our involvement with the rest of the universe is mediated by our brains. Whether these experiences are simply right temporal lobe activity, as many suspect, or, as Britton's work hints and Morse believes, a whole brain effect, remains an open question.

It also says that there's no real explanation for the drowning girl's experience.

Which is a helluva a long way from "evidence of afterlife, heaven, hell, and Gawd."

Galileo said it best:

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

You should look into it.

hell is a work of the imagination

for each person, their interpretation of hell is either pop-culture (which includes religion), that is a devil and lava and eternal torture (inquisition style nonetheless!), or it's their fears about life itself

let's dumb it down a bit, and say i, as a kid, touch fire, am burned, and am scarred for life refusing to be anywhere near fire, my hell then might be eternal fire... there's nothing really to be feared of course, the kid was dumb or something accidental happened

if you asked me what i thought hell was, it would be the world of Eraserhead, THAT's hell to me, because i fear the idea of my life becoming as pathetic Henry's, meaningless and obsessed with sex, not necessarily soulless but lacking a conscious or self-awareness or desire for anything

but imo hell is a work of the imagination, hell is our brain interpreting the real hells that exist in our heads by giving ourselves less-frightening visions that we can tolerate and still go on with our lives, albeit if sometimes stopping before going too far because we see the tip of the ice berg of what wrenching shiat our brains spew out as far as the "dirty, evil consequence" is

it's nothing but concepts

This thread needs more Pope...

If an Atheist can speak in absolute and say there absolutley is NO God then by the same token the Pope has a Right to say there is a Hell. And no this isn't harming anyone, its just defining the parameters of his faith and as the head of which he has every right to do so. If you don't like it don't subscribe.

elchip: Is there a report on whether... say, Hindu people with near-death experiences see Ganesh, or Islamic people see Muhammad, etc?

Essentially, yes. Buddhists, at the very least, from my tiny sum of searching.

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/buddhism02.html

People also have full and complete realizations of their past lives, or simply experience nothing at all.

It's a large group of very widely-varying experiences. Nothing to be drawing much in the way of conclusions on, simply because the data-set's too large and the variables too uncontrolled.

luke10_27

I'm not sure why you keep pushing that Discover article. It's sensationalized popular press material and not a primary source, for one. More importantly, though, the only take home message that can be reasonably drawn from it is that the state of "death" is a nontrivial one and perhaps an arbitrary judgement.

Breathing and blood circulating don't really mean anything, they are simply necessary to supply the materials for upkeep of cellular metabolism. In the nervous system this functions to maintain separation of ions across cell membranes and resting membrane potentials in a state that action potentials can be fired. As long as this is achieved, the cell is functioning. This can happen in a dish for hours. A girl remembering hearing things said around her while "dead" is perhaps slightly unusual, but far from paranormal.

Summary: distinguishing life from death is not easy. When the system in question is the central nervous system (that is the memories being talked about in the article), the implication is merely that the diagnosis of "dead" was imprecise and incorrect.

Drakkenmaw: "Brain death" cannot be recovered from essentially by definition, because it is when the part of your body that allows you to think and reason dies. It is the state when the brain ceases to function and has no electrical activity. Once you're brain dead, your body can be kept operating by machines but you will never wake up again.

When the Terri Schiavo thing happened, people that were officially 'brain dead' at one time or another spoke up to say 'hello!'. OK - you have states where there is 'no detectable activity' and then you have states where the brain is, in fact, damaged. Like a piece is missing, atrophied, or is physically altered in some way that it no longer functions. Most of Terri Schiavo's brain had rotted away.

You can't speak in absolutes when you really on technology. There are likely different states of consciousness that are currently not measurable. This does not mean they don't exist.

*not saying the concept of hell is bad though, just that it isn't a one-two step kind of thing

Of course the Pope knows Hell is real. He's been getting live and up to the minute news and weather reports from his predecessors.

/one please
//yes, the seat right next to Dante Alighieri

"Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still threat'ning to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n"

First thing I thought of....

Crux'd

The "religious right" in North America is constantly trying to have their religion taught in schools, have it on national monuments, etc.

All I ask is for the religious to keep it to themselves. It's a personal thing. Have your church, do all that, just don't use government money or power to do it.

jingks: JOEKC I want back the money I donated to save all those Pagan Babies.

i'm actually curious as to how money was going to save the souls of pagan babies?

It probably went for altar wine. It seemed to disappear pretty fast in our parish.

Anyone seen muninsfire?

2007-03-27 04:57:51 PM Crux'd


If an Atheist can speak in absolute and say there absolutley is NO God then by the same token the Pope has a Right to say there is a Hell. And no this isn't harming anyone, its just defining the parameters of his faith and as the head of which he has every right to do so. If you don't like it don't subscribe.


The atheism you're speaking of is not the norm. Normally, they refuse to espouse a belief in a supernatural metaphysical circumstance and residents of this circumstance. As for the Pope not harming anyone, if only that were the case. The AIDS epidemic in Africa, for one, would like to have a word with you.

Crux'd

If an Atheist can speak in absolute and say there absolutley is NO God then by the same token the Pope has a Right to say there is a Hell. And no this isn't harming anyone, its just defining the parameters of his faith and as the head of which he has every right to do so. If you don't like it don't subscribe.

Or rag on him endlessly as is your right. Whichever.

yes hell does exist, its called ft. lauderdale.